From an address delivered by George Barker at the Recontre Mondiale de Poésie Expo, 1967. On our poetic duties, 2015.

‘ . . . What happens when a human being reads or, as I should prefer to put it, is read to by a poem? What happens is that he receives a perhaps comprehensible message from the dark heart of things. For when the heart of things is subjected to the formal interrogation of the poet it is, to precisely that degree, dominated or subjugated by the courage that puts the question. It is made to confess.

2 thoughts on “From an address delivered by George Barker at the Recontre Mondiale de Poésie Expo, 1967. On our poetic duties, 2015.”

You wouldn’t believe the happenstance of the discovery: quick-rearranging a closet to make room for a folding chair, about to toss a shopping bag found therein, containing a book published 1970: GEORGE BARKER: ESSAYS. And as a blurb, the following: ‘That George Barker has never been fashionable is a tribute to his poetic integrity.’ And on the inner flap, the following: ‘Central to everything George Barker writes is his recognition that that poet’s responsibility is ultimately to his muse, an act of faith he has demonstrated in his own life which has cost him dear in terms of recognition by the official poetasters.’ Ha!

Really, I have no idea where this book came from. (The bag also contained a hard envelope housing my graduate diploma, which, believe me, hasn’t been looked at in years.) First two orders of reading from it are “Therefore all Poems are Elegies” and “Poem in an Orange Wig.”